I accepted this account of what was in fact absence without leave, and he then suggested that if I had nothing else on hand I might help him in making a toboggan-slide. Never having heard of such a thing I accepted the invitation. Securing a couple of shovels we cleared a path to the knoll; and, on the way, Mr. Hosmer explained that Angus Cameron, another new pupil, hailing from Canada, had brought to the school a toboggan, a kind of sled, and we were to make a smooth path or slide for it, so the boys and girls could try it in the afternoon when there were no lessons. We went to work with a will, spanking the snow down with the shovels, leveling uneven places and forming a clear, hard track from the top of the Knoll to the brook. On the edge of the bank we piled up an inclined plane, wetting down the snow and building a mound perhaps five feet high. From this elevation, Mr. Hosmer stated, the toboggan, flying down the slide, would shoot upward and forward and land on the far side of the brook. That seemed to me a very desirable thing to do, and, while I finished up the shovel-work, my companion went back to the Hive and brought out the toboggan. This conveniency, well enough known to-day, was new to us, and we did not quite know how to manage it. However, we got onto the thing somehow, and away we went down the slide. The slide was all right and the inclined plane was all right, so we made the descent and the ascent all right, soaring over the brook like a bird, but the landing on the far side was all wrong. We hit the snowbank like a battering ram, the snow piling up in front of us as hard as stone; the shock was terrific! Mr. Hosmer got the worst of it as he catapulted into the drift, while I alighted in a heap on his shoulders. He scrambled out of the drift on all fours, concerned only with learning whether I was badly hurt. On my assurance that unless his back and legs and arms were broken, there was no damage done, he straightened up and declared he was unhurt but dreadfully humiliated. “How could a man be such a condemned idiot as to plunge head-first against a barricade like that?” This was the question suggested to his mind, only he did not say “condemned idiot” exactly, but he apologized for the emphatic words he did use, and as they do not look well in print, they need not be repeated.